Philosophical Exercises

(The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise every month. This article is part of a series. In the previous episode, we explored Postural Yoga and the sense of earth ) For the month of March, I tried to practice Spinozist mindfulness. It’s not that “Spinozist mindfulness” is an established practice, mind you. I just wanted to see if it could be! In the end, my impression is that Spinoza and mindfulness are not a perfect match. However, they are far from being a bad match. I don’t know if my impression is correct, and I suspect that verifying it would require no less than answering some very thorny questions of Spinoza scholarship (more on that later). My tentative speculation is that the paradigmatic Spinozist practice of recalling the philosophical system laid out in the Ethics might be closer to loving kindness meditation , not mindfulness. All of this pondering started as I was reading Christos Hadjioannou ’s excellent article about what a Stoic version or a Heid...